really beautiful, when i was in my teens i made a sun hat, it took very long to complete, at least one summer and was so heavy that its rim never held starch and always fell on the face, maybe i used some wrong thread to crochet it, another one, salfetka we call it, from red woolen thread was used pretty long time under our phone, then it got lost during some moving perhaps, the last time i've been home i didn't see it, that's all my crocheting experience
i was reading, watching HGTV DOD today, nice, kinda relaxing to watch how people make things

I make collars from the 1880-1914 magazines, but even when the sizing (in both senses) turns out well it's hard to figure out when or how to wear them. Demurely? Ironically? Channeling some aristo in red cork heels for whom lace was the mark of a manhood I neither have nor recognize? I need time to think through these things.

I've never tatted, although I've contemplated it; descriptions of how you do it have always looked a little obscure, and the idea of buying whatever it is you need (a shuttle?) and then figuring out how to go about it seemed like too much work. When I get sick of crocheting (hopefully not before I've finished the bedspread I'm working on), I may give it a whirl.

It's all about channeling the fidgeting -- it gives me something to do on the subway. And has the advantage, considered subway-wise, of requiring a short blunt hook, rather than two long pointy needles.

our school uniforms for girls required white collars, so used to stitch and take it off from the uniform to wash every week, i recalled now i made crocheting a collar too with manjets, but those tended to become yellow after some time if to wash many times, so just nylon ready made lace collars were more popular

I used to knit, but I'm painfully slow and bad at the actual sweater construction. Buck has an Irish fisherman's sweater I knit before I met him, aiming at my size, that's way too big for him -- while the sleeve length works with the gibbon-esque arms, you could put three of him in the body. I like doing all the cabling and complex stitches, but getting the gauge right and finishing is annoying, so I haven't made a sweater in years. (Also, surprisingly expensive. One nifty thing about thread crochet is that a couple of bucks worth of thread lasts for ages.)

I haven't been doing much with origami for years, but that used to be a thing. There's something about dull, complex activities that shuts up an annoying interior monologue -- if I'm counting stitches or trying to get a fold straight, then I'm not thinking.

cuffs, i found
the fastest i knitted a sweater was a week, a very simple grey without any ornaments, but i didn't stitch together the parts, i have some kind of the inner block when it comes to that, or just lazy, not good with finishing projects they say in the horoskopes, very true, so my sister stitched the parts together and she still wears the sweater sometimes, all other sweaters i made, 6-7 of them were all very heavy and long, really not suitable for wearing
i also enjoy the mechanical quality of knitting work, nice distracting, should pick it up again

I learned to crochet from my sister, who was in the crocheting project in 4-H for years. I can't read a pattern, so I just make things up. I don't have enough down time to do it, though. I learned on a longish stay at my parents, where I needed something to do while watching television.

I have an inferiority complex about knitting. I can do it, in a beginnery way, and I really want to get better and am constantly buying knitting books and collecting patterns and even occasionally buying yarn and starting a project.

But then the fucking internet takes over my "sitting around fidgeting with my hands" time. So unproductive.

Hell no. This was in western Mass., Northampton. He was wearing loose-fitting pants and a t-shirt, probably. That wasn't striking. It was the sheer lack of concern for what anyone might think -- but this was Northampton, and people might have noticed his behavior but likely shrugged or smiled, broadly or gently.

That reminds me. I was reading the English-language dissertation of this German guy, and he kept using "apparently" to mean, "as you can see from the above". So freaking annoying. That was his biggest mistake, as far as I could tell.

Maybe. I learned origami at age 9 or 10 from a Japanese monk—not Buddhist or Shinto, but Catholic, at the monastery where we used to go to Mass in upstate NY when I was a kid. Brother Patrick. We would sit at a big table in this quiet room where the light was filtered through stained-glass windows; I have this vivid memory of it as a really peaceful place, but in retrospect, doing the craft was likely a big part of that.

Well, tatting shuttles are also cheap, and the reason tatting instructions look a little obscure is that there's a tiny practical joke in every stitch; you use the shuttle to loop one thread around another, in a clove-hitch pretty much, but then you snap the outer thread tight and the hitch gets transferred to the other thread, and is now much more `locked'.

What I like about it is that it's really portable, even more pocketable than crochet; and it often gives women older than my mother serious Proustian moments, and they come over and tell me about their mother or grandmother while watching my hands go loop, loop, pop.

The counting is also very calming, especially as tatting designs are often made of nested subroutines, and rolling the subroutines out is so, so, soothing. However, almost all tatted work is not to my taste, so I don't do it much and I hardly ever finish.

LB, do you know about Ravelry? It is a whole online community of boring people, including err... some good friends of mine with whom you can discuss your crochet.

It is interesting that the Internet has caused this revival of hand knitting and associated crafts. Is hand knitting programming for chicks? The community has even spawned a comic book:

Imagine you're a teenager, and you have some... special powers. Maybe even super powers. And one day, at a sleepover, your best friend in the whole world tells you--you're not alone. So begins the adventure for a couple of teenagers, a single mom and yarn shop owner, and a whole bunch of hand knitted fun.

wow, LB, you are so rockstar. those are amazing. there's a martha stewart how to crochet snowflakes thing that looks pretty easy (to the non-crochet person); if you started now you could cover your whole tree next year. but seriously, that is cool.

OT - hay ttaM, how's the snow with you? C is ill, so was spared the whole train thing. Eldest went to school - nearly all the teachers were there, but hardly any kids, so was sent home again. So is a nice day here with lots of playing in the garden - the dog LOVES the snow.

Berkeley, Ca.-based Clif Bar and Co. pulled eight more of its protein bars......

The recall has reached a fever pitch since it was expanded to include all products - from roasted peanuts to peanut butter -- from Peanut Corporation of America's plant at Blakely, Ga., where Food and Drug Administration investigators found two strains of salmonella and evidence that on 12 occasions in 2007 and 2008 the company sold food even after it had tested positive for salmonella. In a startling revelation on Saturday, the Atlanta Journal Constitution said the president of Peanut Corp., Stewart Parnell, serves on an industry advisory board that helps the U.S. Department of Agriculture set quality standards for peanuts.

London, in comparison, is absolute carnage. I managed to waste a good 5.5hrs travelling in from Oxford, walking across to the City due to collapse of transport infrastructure and then giving up and going back home again, as colleagues from exotic places like Baker Street couldn't be bothered to come in.

Not that I am at all bitter.

Still - hurrah for crochet! Although I admit to not having the patience for threat crochet. Or much. I just made a 9" granny square as I don't have the attention span for making a blanket out of normal sized ones.

In America we leave all threat crochet in the capable hands of Jack Bauer.

My grandmother tatted but no one else in my family bothered to learn, leaving me continually tempted to take it up. I'm three weeks shy of the first anniversary of quitting smoking and am still trying to find things to do with my hands. Do yarn shops carry tatting supplies or are there, like, Tatting for Dummies type books around at chain bookstores? All the talk of it as a way to shut down the inner monologue and occupy the hands, especially clew's description of rolling out the subroutines, sound like perfect replacement's for the smoker's percussion of patting to find the pack, packing it against one's palm, etc., which is really what I miss.

55, 57: Sounds like Washington DC. I visited there when I was in college on a weekend where they got, maybe, a foot of snow -- a real storm, but nothing that should have disrupted an entire city. And it was chaos: unplowed streets, people wandering in the middle of the road, nothing was moving.

Do yarn shops carry tatting supplies or are there, like, Tatting for Dummies type books around at chain bookstores?

The internet is your friend. I wouldn't trust a yarn shop for tatting supplies, because even if they've got stuff, it's uncommon enough that the clerk probably doesn't tat himself. But weird little online retailers know everything: this place popped up on a quick google, and I'm sure there are others.

My other problem with tatting is that, useless as thread crochet it, I at least have some sense of what you can do with the products: bedspreads, tablecloths, doilies. What do you do with tatted lace other than attach it to clothes? And what if you don't make your own clothes?

Oh, without a word of exaggeration, 1 - 2 inches will completely stop the entire south of England. The snow can be barely at the level where it even dusts the top of your shoes as you walk and the country will cease to operate.

Because real heavy snowstorms are rare in the south, I can see why they'd cause disruption. There's just no real incentive for capital investment in huge numbers of snow ploughs or gritters.

But everything stops here for stuff that just amazes me. It's barely snow at all.

60: Thanks! As to uses, my grandmother used to make tiny, slightly psychedelic flowers and glue them to blank cards to make personalized stationary for herself, but I am mainly just interested in learning the art of it for the hell of it.

64: One thing -- it looks as though you use the same thread as for thread crochet (although my sense is that once you know what you're doing, tatting thread is as fine or finer than the finest crochet thread). Buy expensive thread -- you don't use a lot, and even the expensive stuff is pretty cheap, and it's noticeably easier to work with.

My inlaws bought me a bunch of cheap thread, and while it's usable, I wouldn't want to do anything too complicated with it because it's rougher, and the stitches bind. So I've made a whole lot of string shopping bags.

And way back to 45: Yes, exactly. I spent a while trying to teach myself guitar, and it served very much the same purpose. (The downside, and why I haven't really picked up a guitar in about a decade, is that it's less portable, and other people can hear you doing it. And I'm painfully unmusical, and have weak hands.)

The weak hands thing isn't a real excuse! Little tiny kids play guitar. It just takes a bit of diligent practice and learning to relax. Most of what people think of as 'weakness' is caused by them being too tense [and fatiguing themselves that way] rather than by anything to do with the force needed to play guitar.

Also, these days you can get silent guitars [silent acoustics, I mean]. Or just play an electric with headphones.

I could probably get past the weak hands (although I never made a bar chord sound like anything at all -- it feels as if I'd need to be stronger), but I still run into the fact that I can't do it on the subway, which is the dead time I have for this sort of thing, and playing an instrument is much less interruptible than making stuff. If the kids need to talk to me six times in twenty minutes while I'm trying to do something else, I can stop crocheting for a minute and start up again. If I were trying to learn how to play something, I'd have to brain them.

59, 61, 63: As noted this is a pretty much the inevitable result of lack of capital investment and general infrastructure to deal with the abnormal* weather situation. You can see it the other way around when you have notorious and deadly Chicago heat waves where the heat and humidity levels are not much above those which are commonly found in the southern parts of the US.

*DC is an interesting case. Overall, significant snow is somewhat rare and there are years with very little, but the area will get the occasional really big dump when it is on the snow side of strong Nor'easters. In fact, really big snow storms with ineffective city response helped set the tone against Marion Barry at two different points (1987 & 1996) in his checkered career as mayor.

Where's JRoth or anyone else familiar with early Waldorf education to explain that kids who learn handwork make for good people?

Kids who learn handwork make for good people. Rudolf Steiner has taught us this.

When I went to observe Iris' class a couple weeks ago, the parents were each given some "useful work" to do while we sat. I got to cut the paper for "crayoning" (I don't know why they use it as a verb; I guess because "coloring" has "stay inside the lines" connotations, and "drawing" has representational connotations).

I was really impressed by Iris' behavior (and that she studiously ignored me, as she was supposed to). On the way home she explained that she was on her best behavior for me. Uh, thanks, but try to act that way every day.

Also, as long as I'm dipping into this thread's past, Iris has been obsessed with the Little House books - I'm pretty sure she and AB/AB's mom got through the whole series in about a month, despite distractions of the holidays. The weekend we were in a cabin in Cook Forest, she spent the whole time playing "Laura and Mary" with her best friend. The grownups switched off being "Ma and Pa." Cute, and it did give them slightly more incentive to be helpful.

The barre chord thing is purely technique, lack of practice and tension. Nothing to do with strength. If you have anything near normal hand strength, you have enough hand strength to play barre chords.

The problem is, that beginners play with far too much tension, and that makes everything harder. Which makes them tense, which makes for poorer technique, which makes it harder. it's a vicious circle.

Last time this came up, I mentioned that I can play barre chords without using my thumb at all. No hand strength employed. It's all in the arm position.

FWIW, I played with too much tension for years and years. It was only injuries that finally led me to sort it out. These days I play almost completely without tension in either arm. Doesn't make me a better player [I'm an advanced intermediate player at best] but it does mean I don't suffer any pain or discomfort from playing/practicing.

84 sounds right to me. It seems historically I've alternated a lot between playing quite a lot for a while and then hardly at all. Whenever I take it up again, one of the first problems is getting myself to relax my arms again. You need a little work to redevelop calluses, but really you shouldn't have discomfort from playing unless you really overdo it timewise.

I do remember from back when I was trying to learn that "practicing until your fingers bleed", which I'd always thought of as a hyperbolic way of describing someone putting an insane amount of effort into it, actually didn't take all that long.

86: If you don't have calluses, it won't take long. It's a really bad idea especially when beginning, though, because you won't be able to play till they heel.

When I was a teenager I'd sometimes play 8 or 10 hours in a day. Usually my fingers would hold up ok, occasionally I'd lose an entire callus, which was a pain, especially if I had to play in the next few days.

I'm too lazy to play that much. I went through a phase maybe 4 or 5 years back -- when I was studying for some classical guitar exams -- when I played a couple of hours a day, regularly, for months on end. But these days I probably only play 3 or 4 hours a week.

Which is why plan to actually get good at playing jazz/swing material gets perpetually derailed!

I've been too lazy to play that much for ages. I'm on a few hours a week if that at the moment, but haven't played much seriously since before grad school. I was obsessive about it for a couple years in my teens though.

LB - a friend of mine tats, and then enters the doilies in her County Fair. She does a nice job, so then we get to see her lace at the State Fair, next to a big ribbon. I totally think you should do that. I think it would make the fairs even more fun if you had a craft entered.

I think Robust McManlyPants should enter state fair tatting competitions under that name. "In memory of my Grandmother", the card could read.

I don't remember how I learned; probably in a three-page modern intro to a Dover reprint of an Edwardian leaflet. For complicated things, the Internet is your friend.

Almost all tatted designs are ugly to my eyes, and it's getting worse by the decade, but perhaps the art needs radical restructuring, sort of like the Institute for Figuring and their hyperbolic crochet.

It took me three hours to get into central london instead of the usual one; my car is somewhere on the end of a tube line; then the fucking airport shut down all the short-haul flights -- I should have been in Copenhagen tonight -- and the BBC's travel service shut down their emergency number because there has been a weather emergency. All this because of at most two inches of snow. I have photographs, taken what seem to be several centuries ago this morning.

I think Robust McManlyPants should enter state fair tatting competitions under that name.

This year I really am entering something in the "Flavored Cornbreads" category, but under my real name. (One has to, I did check.) I just couldn't handle all that in the middle of the election build-up and such last year, what with other things vying for my time.

And, because I know this fascinates you, the person I considered paying to teach me to tat has a vendor booth at the state fair every year and is a friend of Rah's.

Practicing a musical instrument serves the same function, I think. The calming one, I mean. Just enough focus required to shut down the more annoying parts of one's self-narrative.

Once you've gotten halfway decent at it, but before then the frustration of constantly fucking up can interfere with the calming effect, at least IME.

Actually, maybe you and soup can help with a problem I've been having. I bought myself one of these a while back, with the intention of teaching myself to play, and while I enjoyed it I did run into one problem: it rapidly got to the point where I could only play for about ten minutes before my strumming hand would start to tingle and fall asleep. Best as I can figure, the pressure of my arm on the upper bout was causing the problem (I was playing sitting down, holding the guitar in folk position). One thought I had was to switch to classical position, but other than that do you have any suggestions for how to avoid that in the future?

I do not know NY well enough to know which of these fairs is right for you. Shame the city itself looks to have given up on its fair. Seems like the city of New York would be able to come up with some amazing crafts and quilts and preserves if it were still something they wanted to do. Where do the pigeon fanciers show their birds?

I am, of course, just projecting. Every year I go to the fair and wish I also made beautiful things. I spend a year not making them, then go to the fair and have the same regret again. I've been thinking about taking the Master Food Preserver series at my local ag extension. If I had beautiful little jars of things, I could show those...

Josh, perhaps you can try putting your right foot on a block (a few inches high), or otherwise playing around with the geometry a bit.

It's really hard to see exactly what you're doing without watching you play, but sometimes people grip the body tightly to them with their right forearm, which can cause what is happening to you. In this case, a different sitting position and/or a strap can help lose the feeling that the guitar is getting away from you, and let you relax the arm.

Sometimes it's just a big guitar body badly matched to a small human body, but in your case unlikely.

I have read -- in a picture book of very strange fancy pigeons -- that New York City pigeon fanciers have introduced something new to their very old sport; they teach their flocks to cosy up to others' pigeons, during races, and bring the strangers home. There's a name for this; `muddling'?

Urbanites; the real mavericks.

---

I hear that modern tomatoes are not reliably acid enough for old canning practices, because we breed against it.

Hee. I don't think any of our chickens are particularly show quality. Also, my pies are respectable casual efforts, but I don't even win Pie Contest against other non-bakers consistently. I just like trashtalking.

Likewise with the crochet. I've impressed the heck out of myself with the doilies in this post, but they're nothing particularly arcane (the patterns did, in fact, come out of one of those Dover reprint books). I'd expect the merest of county fairs to be riddled with old women who would mock me for entering trash of this kind.

The LA county fair is in beautiful Pomona, named for the goddess of fruits. The run some very funny ads about LS types observing farm animals for the first time. The judge trying the wheat grass pie is also good.

Maybe. My friend who wins the State Fair is our age. But if your lovely doilies are respectable beginner efforts, maybe the old women would coo supportively at you.

Maybe one of them would take you under her wing, and then you'd have a accomplished but demanding instructor, and you would have to do a vigorous training regime to handle the demands of your apprenticeship, and there would be competitions, and then you would have to take it back to the streets (=subways, with a wise passenger who reminds you that you are creating beauty) to remember why you started all this and THEN you can show up triumphantly at the State Fair, with your old-style technique and precision but defiant street patterns!

I am, of course, just projecting. Every year I go to the fair and wish I also made beautiful things

For the first time I noticed June Taylor had a booth at the ferry bldg f's mkt, in front of which I stood gawping for a few minutes before deciding that no, there was no point in laying out the cash demanded for any of her products. But damn, they looked amazing.

There is always a training montage. Sometimes it is too short, and you don't know whether it'll be slow motion or not. But there is always a training montage.

Dude. If it is accidently the movie where you sit around with biddies and talk about feelings and learn to respect wisdom, get the fuck out. It will just lead to revelations about your family and crying. The soundtrack should be an early clue.

You have to win your way into the State Fair, at a County Fair. You and your doily can't just show up at the State Fair like renegades.

Shows what I know. Like I said, we used to go to the State Fair sometimes (it's a BIG deal; they let kids out of school for it and stuff), but it wasn't a big part of my upbringing. I wasn't even sure until I checked just now that there was a Bernalillo County Fair, but there is. It doesn't get as much attention.

127: Yes, especially now that we don't sugar all our jams into submission.

124: My tatting experience, as described somewhere way above, has not been the family-revelations-and-tears movie, it has been more reconciliation between generations and then I go get my groove on with twinkling approval from the granny in question.

Magrat probably tats edgings for all those curtains; Nanny Ogg has daughters-in-law to make doilies to go under the mugs; but Granny Weatherwax? Hm. There's got to be a shadow lace to go with the dark morris.

Oh! Programmers thinking this might be a nice hand-thing to smooth your brain! Try bobbin lace; it's like playing Fringer, and it makes noises like Tinkertoys, and it doesn't require any hand strength so it's good for RSI seasons. Not portable at all, though.

entering any competitions will add stress, not reduce
i would never even try to compete, i do many mistakes in the pattern anyway so it looks not perfect to compete anywhere, but it's okay, would become like the uniquely one piece, coz the compelling thing in handiworks is the absentmindedness with which to do it, it's like meditation but with benefits of making something to use

Once you've gotten halfway decent at it, but before then the frustration of constantly fucking up can interfere with the calming effect.

This is exactly how I feel about video games, which is why I can barely play any of them to my satisfaction before getting so frustrated that I give up, because what is the point of a hobby that annoys me? (And yes, I know, there are more productive things than video games but I really need something for those times that TV sucks, I have no Netflix, and my brain is already mush).

Knecht, I have been reading the Little House series to my kids too, but have yet to run across the words "bodice" "sexy" or even "demure." Maybe you've gotten farther in the series than I have?

Near the end of book eight, Laura pulls out yards and yards of her handmade lace to make her wedding dress. The "sexy" is subtley implied, if it is implied at all.

I found it interesting that the book concocts a complicated story to explain why Laura and Almanzo hace to get married right away, in light of the fact that they have been spending every Sunday taking long, unchaperoned carriage rides together.

Soup has already offered good advice. Look also at the position of your strumming arm. Personally, I have mine a bit further round the guitar so my arm comes across the body almost from inline with the bridge rather than diagonally down from the upper bout. This is a pretty common position in gypsy and swing players.

But what works for different people can be different. Again, paying attention to what your doing will help. Thing about where your arm is contacting the guitar and how hard you are pressing. You want your arm to sort of float with only the lightest contact.

138: Were the next UnfoggeDCon to take place at a state fair, it would be pretty rad.

I nominate the Fayette County Fair, it's kinda like Pittsburgh, only without the sophistication 'n' at. (It's a few miles past where LB was canvassing only ruralerer.)

In a black and far off corner of my mind
There's a box of something I can't quite define
It houses circus freaks, temptation and the Fayette County Fair
And it reeks of love gone sour, suspicion and big hair

137: For some reason, the box set we have contains only the first five little house books. As far as I can tell, there is no reason why all eight shouldn't be regarded as canon. Wikipedia tells me of a posthumously published ninth book based on a handwritten manuscript, which is obviously not canon.

The New Mexico State Fair is indeed a big deal, and would be an awesome venue for Unfoggedcon. The model railroad building is totally sweet, and the commercial pavilion has such interesting demonstrations of Ginsu knives and such. And OMG the Navajo fry bread.

And poultry! My sister had her finger bitten by a turkey at the fair one year. Serves her right for poking at the turkey.

okay, mlns read it, but it resounded with me coz i got critisized by a friend that i translated a classical poem to sound too simple
two times a day to be told that is like too much
regarding the quote content, nobody understands the mind, so it must be too simple

I found some great videos of various violinists playing in subway stations and in a couple of cases on trains a while back, but when I went back to look at them some months later they'd all been taken down. Probably idiotic copyright takedowns.

PA has the Pennsylvania Farm Show in Harrisburg in January, slightly weird timing. The summer fairs are county fairs. For Western PA, the Butler Fair is a big one. Also, people venture across the border and go to the Canfield Fair in Ohio.

The New Mexico State Fair is indeed a big deal, and would be an awesome venue for Unfoggedcon. The model railroad building is totally sweet, and the commercial pavilion has such interesting demonstrations of Ginsu knives and such. And OMG the Navajo fry bread.

That reminds me of a story about fry bread at the State Fair:

We were at the Fair once when I was a kid. It was getting late and we were going to leave soon, but we were getting a little hungry so we stopped at one of the random little frybread stands and got some frybread. My dad hung back, though I'm not sure if it was because he wasn't hungry or because he thought the whole getting-frybread-at-the-state-fair thing was silly. Or maybe he just didn't like frybread that much. But my mom and my sister and I got some, and while they were making it my mom started chatting with the Navajo lady who was taking the money while her mother made the frybread.

My mom asked where they were from and the lady said Farmington. My mom responded with "Oh, my husband's from Farmington. Well, actually he's from [extremely small and obscure rural community near Farmington]. Do you know where that is?" The Navajo lady, a bit surprised, said that that was actually where they were from too. She had her mom come out from making the frybread and my mom called my dad over, and they chatted a bit in Navajo. They remembered each other, although the old lady hadn't seen my dad since he was a little kid.

As we were leaving the Fair, my dad told us a bit about that lady. She was the last person in the community to still drive a wagon after everyone else had switched to trucks, and she used to come to the store and buy hay, which she would say was "her gasoline." This would have been in the fifties.

181: There are recipes all over the internet, but (and I know we've discussed this here before) they mostly look kind of off to me. I've never made it myself, though, so I don't have a recipe of my own to offer. It's pretty simple, so getting something close shouldn't be too difficult.